The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [133]
A Benedictine friend, a college professor who hasn’t worn a habit in many years, recently spent a lengthy retreat with a cloistered community of women who wear the traditional floor-length habit and head gear. Her comments summarized the ambivalence many contemporary monastic women seem to feel. “I see lovely women . . . looking like many of the holy women of the past. There is something beautiful about that connection with the past, and something inaccessible and mysterious about them in their habits. They really do convey another world. At the same time, I also see the hiding of the body, as if they are asexual beings, and I sense denial in this. I see continuity with the way those holy women of the past were confined by their gender.”
There seems to be a groundswell of feeling among many Benedictine women that they need some form of habit, if only for use in liturgical celebrations. One women’s community in which most sisters gave up the full habit years ago (although many women still wear a simplified veil and black or white clothing) recently added a brief clothing ceremony to their “Rite of Perpetual Profession.” Along with other traditional symbols of monastic life, the prioress hands the sister a cuculla (literally, “little tent,” so called because it is a mass of pleats falling from a yoke). This long, black robe, ancient monastic dress, is the ancestor of all pulpit gowns, and the women wear it for Sunday liturgies, major feasts, profession ceremonies, jubilees, and funerals. Several women in the community have told me that they enjoy this restoration of a link to their monastic past and the visible sense of communal identity that it gives them. I wouldn’t be surprised if other Benedictine women adopt a similar practice. “We need something,” one sister says, “but we can’t let it become something to hide behind.” Another woman wrote to me, “There seems to be a deepening sense of what it means to be monastic, of the life force in a tradition that has perdured through the centuries. We’ve talked so much about simplicity and now we ache to see it more deeply realized in our everyday lives. And, I wonder, if as individualism wears a little thin, this movement to reclaim monastic dress may strengthen. Not a ‘going back to the habit’ but a going forward to reclaim it.”
I’ve long been aware that the subject of the habit generates in Benedictine women an emotional response that, before I understood more of the history, seemed out of proportion to the subject at hand. In a way I find it reassuring that monastic women have not been able to escape the dilemma all women live with. No matter what they wear—a traditional habit or a simplified one, blue jeans or a professorial navy blazer and pleated skirt—they, much more than men, are defined by what they wear. People will take them seriously, or not, based on matters as slight as the length of a skirt or the height of a heel. I am most interested in monastic dress as a form of renunciation, a sign that one is not preoccupied with fashion and possessions. And I recognize, as one sister said to me, that monastic women “can accomplish this without resorting to an outlandish form of clothing,” or as she put it, “an elaborate, expensive, cumbersome habit that is time-consuming to maintain.”
I once visited a sister who, next to a shelf that held socks, underwear, and a sweater, had all the clothing she owned hung on several pegs: her spare habit and scapular, both made of denim, a simple kerchief she wore